Fiona Challis

How To Increase Your Sales – Top Seven Sales Strategies That Really Work with International Sales Training Expert Fiona Challis

Do you want to learn the top sales strategies that will boost your profits and which most business owners are not even aware of? Are you fed up struggling to get leads and converting prospects? Do you want to truly dominate your market?

If you want to boost your sales results in the next few weeks, to hit all of your targets and to know how to get the best from your sales people come and learn the Top Seven Sales Strategies That Really Work from international sales training expert and professional corporate coach Fiona Challis.

You’ll discover the same techniques that Fiona has shared with thousands of sales professionals and business owners across the UK, Europe and Africa and which have helped them to achieve extraordinary results – one of her clients MTN Nigeria increased sales results by 400%, after receiving her unique blend of sales training and coaching.

At the next SuccessTrack event, Fiona will show you:

• How to improve the effectiveness of your sales team
• How to identify what you are really selling
• How to position your product or service in a way that appeals to customers
• How to get sales people to take ownership and accountability for their actions
• How to identify and introduce a ‘Prime Selling Time’ for sales
• How to help your team to work smarter not harder
• How to identify what really motivates a team and how to harness it for maximum efficiency and profits
• How to identify your revenue tap and turn it on
• How to communicate with prospects and customers so they are eager to buy
• How to gain focus, momentum and get as many qualified opportunities in your pipeline as possible
• How to motivate your team to achieve your company goals

SuccessTrack delegates have been blown away by what she has taught. “At the last event, one woman told me she was going to completely change the way she ran her sales team as a result of what she’d learnt from me,” says Fiona.

“I do an exercise to help people understand what they’re selling. I ask them what they are selling. Ten times out of ten business owners tell me they’re selling a product or service. So I rephrase the question and ask, ‘What are your customers buying?’ They get really, really stuck on that question because they are so caught up selling products and services that they’ve completely forgotten what it is that the customers are buying which is the value add and the business benefits.

“People find that exercise very difficult to do – they’re not able to put together their own Value Proposition. What does that say about their business – if they don’t know the value add of what they’re selling, how are their customers going to know?

“That’s one of the biggest ‘aha’ moments for business owners, when they realise they’re not selling products or services but Value Add. Customers are going to buy your product or service either because there’s a pain that you’re going to help with or to remove OR there is a real business benefit for them to using your product or service. People will do much more in this climate to avoid pain than they will to have a gain – a gain is seen as a luxury at the moment because of budgets being cut whereas the pain is a necessity – it’s something that could be limiting the team’s performance or limiting a business’ potential.”

Fiona trained as a coach with Jonathan Jay’s first company and qualified as a corporate and executive coach, personal life coach and small business coach. She was also the first person to qualify to become one of its licensed trainers. “I invested a total of £16,000 with Jonathan and I got my money back on the first workshop I ran. It really does work. I only had to run three of those workshops and I couldn’t run any more because I couldn’t take any more clients. It’s all about attitude – it’s listening what you’re told to do from an expert and going out and doing it. That’s why you pay the money.”

Prior to training as a coach, Fiona spent 15 successful years in sales, of which seven were spent as European sales director for McAfee International [anti-virus software and computer security company]. She then formed her own company Sales & Sensibility, a specialist provider of tailored sales and management development programmes to sales organisations.

“I have over 15 years experience in sales and sales leadership. I started my first business when I was 18, selling beauty products into the European marketplace. I then went on to sell lots of different products – health insurance, advertising – but then worked for Yellow Pages and stayed with them for four years. Part of my job was to teach people coming into the company how they could be successful selling new business and be successful as a telesales rep. I was then headhunted by McAfee.

“They hired me to turn an under-performing sales team around which I did and the team was very successful. They started to give me more and more countries to manage and within three years, I was managing all of their European sales teams. So we had about 120 salespeople selling into all the European countries, about eight sales manages and a channel model which means we had a lot of resellers selling the product. I was also responsible for ensuring that the resellers were effectively selling the products as well.

“In terms of responsibility, it was about creating a sales strategy that would be successful and creating a unique sales approach that would guarantee a higher level of sales success, ensuring that the sales team were motivated and taking responsibility for their own success, and committed to achieving the company’s goals.”

One of the reasons her programmes gain such great results is that Fiona has been in the position that most salespeople and managers are in: she understands their challenges and the frustrations but more importantly she helps them to create a solution that will help them gain:

• increased productivity
• increased profitability
• increased motivation
• and help their sales teams to take responsibility for their own success and
• a higher level of commitment to achieving both personal and company goals.

Clients that have worked with Fiona say she is a truly inspirational coach and she has a natural ability to get the very best out of salespeople.

Fiona Challis is an international sales management training expert, professional corporate coach and motivational speaker with a unique and very successful approach to sales training. Her articles appear regularly in the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management’s Winning Edge publication as well as on the Modern Selling online forum for sales professionals.